When we were in Melbourne and I was waxing rhapsodical about kugelhopf he had a strange and frightening fancy: cake soup.

Now, I didn’t know about any of this, but apparently it’s from a Penny Arcade thing. They took cheap, nasty carrot cake, cubed it and added milk. They looked upon it, and lo, it was good (apparently).

But Kugelhopf is not cheap. Nor is it nasty. It is so perfectly delicious alone, and such a rare treat for me, that I could not conceive of perverting its delicious destiny.

However, after a while of resisting I started to get curious. Cake is delicious, Dan pointed out. Cake with a glass of milk is pretty great.

Okay, I thought, but soggy cake?

There were a few very hot and humid days after I got home from Melbourne, and the kugelhopf was sitting in its box on the counter the whole time. By the time I cleared a space for it in the fridge the damage was probably done. After a few days in the fridge it was a bit dried out. One might even have called it stale.

I let Dan know that my kugelhopf was sufficiently degraded for me to countenance its soupification. But I’d played hard to get with it for too long, and he was no longer interested. And by now I was positively gagging for kugelsoup.

Fine! I strode into the kitchen. I didn’t anyone else to facilitate my culinary misadventure.*

I took the kugelhopf out of the fridge – it was looking pretty sad by this stage.

It stared up at me, and this is what it saw.
(well, that’s what it would have seen had it had eyes. I’d eaten them days previously, of course, but for your edification I simulated its perspective by putting my phone facedown on the counter and hitting the shutter button.)

Heedless of its reproachful gaze, I tore its flesh into neatish little chunks.

And then threatened it with a milk bottle.

It didn’t believe I’d really use enhanced interrogation techniques, so I doused it.

I could tell when it’d had enough because it went sort of soggy, limp and floaty.

I ate it. It was pretty good! I was surprised by how much it was like eating Coco Pops or some other sugary cereal, which is probably a damning indictment of contemporary cereal culture. The chocolate didn’t seep out, though, so even when there were only crumbs left it wasn’t much like a chocolate milkshake, and of course it wasn’t crunchy.

I actually made kugelsoup twice. The pictures I have here are from the second time, which was just last night. I also took a few pictures the time before, but they were few in number and generally poor in quality. Also I used different bowls so I wouldn’t’ve been able to just slip them in together without people calling shenanigans.

I’ve been looking at a lot of foodblogs lately, hence the picturetaking probably. One of them mentioned a theory that one can cure oneself of dislike of a food by exposing oneself to it ten times with an open mind. If I had made New Year’s resolutions this year, being more open-minded about food would probably be on there. So with the ten-tries theory in mind I took the plunge and had jelly in my Easyway blended ice beverage the other day. I found I quite liked the texture. So, maybe once will do it sometimes. And maybe I will do more ridiculous things with food that might turn out deliciously, like the kugelsoup.

* Of course, my culinary misadventure couldn’t compare to any of these.

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While I am sure this is delicious, my brain is screaming “Wet cake! WET CAKE!” in panic. I think I would alter the recipe with cream – it would rehydrate the cake, but there wouldn’t be the squelchy texture.

Obviously, that’s my crazy bag, though. I applaud you for being adventurous with food – it’s something I’ve been trying to do a bit recently (it turns out that yes, I don’t like duck).

Hey Julia – is that duck meat (kind of greasy, argh), or duck skin+pancakes? I can see how someone could not like duck, but duck skin (ok, this is an awful name) pancakes, with the hoi sin? Man. That is pretty much the pure definition of delicious, right there (for me. For me delicious involves mouth-watering tanginess, in some respects, which the hoi sin provides, and the duck skin, greens and rice pancake provide an incredibly rich savoury… other kind of deliciousness. anyway. they’re so good).

Of course, I am not telling you you are wrong and duck is delicious shut up. It might not work for you. it’s cool.

Anyway! I also was pretty food-conservative until not all that long ago. But a side effect of my mental health improvement plan was a kind of… distributed empathy, for a while, maybe, where it occured to me, amongst other things, that foods lots of people eat are probably delicious. And so I tried a lot of foods I would not have otherwise tried.

Like chinese food.

Yeah.

So that was an eye-opener and now I wish to eat everything. Also I learned about random combinations of food which are awesome, which has made me more likely to try things like, for instance, bacon rice crispies. And now I am a crazy man, so maybe this mental health improvement thing didn’t work out so good.

Heathersaid,

Julia, do you think it’d make a difference to you if the milk was warmed? Or even just room temperature? I find room temperature milk impossibly delicious, and somehow easier to drink than when it’s just out of the fridge. Warming it a little more could make it more soupy, I think, and less like cake a kid has spilled their cordial on.

Hmm, possibly. And since it’s Kugelhopf, it might feel different, too – I hate the texture of damp sponge cake, but since Kugelhopf is so freaking dense, it might work better. I think it would have to be warm milk rather than room temperature, though. I’m always convinced room temperature milk is going to kill me with its bacterias.

Heathersaid,

In fact, this post was pretty awesome. Makes me want to put milk on cake now, because maybe then I’ll like it more (I’ve never been a huge fan of cake, but I’m slowly coming around under Tab’s influence).